Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (20 page)

26 November 1978

Joy Division play the New Electric Circus, Manchester, supported by the Passage.

1 December 1978

Joy Division play the Salford College of Technology; they are second on the bill, with Ed Banger (Ed Garrity) headlining and Fast Cars (with Steve Brotherdale on drums). Admission: £1.

22 December 1978

Joy Division play the Revolution Club, York, supported by Cabaret Voltaire.

27 December 1978

Joy Division play the Hope & Anchor, London. Admission: 60p.

Nick Tester’s
Sounds
review of the Hope & Anchor gig was scathing:

I hated being the one who drove the van. Apart from making me a suspected serial killer, it meant I had to load and unload the gear all the time. And what do most bands do after gigs? They get pissed and chase girls. Not me. When a gig finished and everybody ran off to the bar I was left to pack the bloody gear. Twinny and Terry might lend a hand if I could collar them before they got a pint in their hands, but they weren’t getting paid so it wasn’t like I could insist. As for the rest of the band, well, Steve would occasionally lend a hand, bless him, but Barney and Ian were always too busy chasing skirt/meeting the fans. I used to have to literally drag them away. Oh God, it used to wind me up so much. Drove me mental! I was always saying to them, ‘Let’s just get the gear done and
then
go to the bar,’ but it always fell on deaf ears.

As a group you’ve got to have responsibility for your gear: let’s face it, without it you’re useless. But that fact was lost on those two. Even Ian still had a PA to shift. I’m sure they thought it got in the van by magic.

‘Well, that’s what we’ve got roadies for, isn’t it?’ Bernard would sneer.

‘Listen, they’re my mates. They don’t get fucking paid to shift your shit. They don’t get fucking paid at all. Do your own fucking shifting or get your own fucking friends to move it.’

The fact was that Terry and Twinny would do the carrying in the afternoon, no problem. Set it up, sort the sound-check, look after it till the doors opened, no problem. But that was because there were no distractions in the afternoon. At night? Forget it. No one wants to do the gear at the end of the night. The only one doing it was the daft bastard driving the van, yours truly.

Some mornings I’d come home from a gig, change into my suit then drive straight to work. There was a pelican crossing outside the docks, right opposite work, where I always used to fall asleep. There was something about reaching that point, eight o’clock in the morning, feeling knackered but nice and warm in the van, and just . . . feeling . . . sleepy . . . My snoozing hotspot, that was.

My workmates would bang on the window to wake me up, laughing.
I’d get to work and try to keep going, but after a really late night I’d have to go hide in the file room and fall asleep on the floor. Either that or risk it at my desk, but I’d just black out and go . . .

Thump
.

‘Oh look, Peter’s fell off his chair again.’

So I was tired. Exhausted, actually.

And I didn’t have epilepsy.

There’s a lot been written about the effect it had on Ian. How he felt embarrassed about the condition, and how the drugs affected him. We saw bits of that: his mood changed a bit; he was quieter, less ready to laugh and more introverted than before, which was understandable. Otherwise he just soldiered on. So instead of taking time off for Ian to rest, and instead of getting together and working out how to adapt to our lead singer’s epilepsy, we buried our heads in the sand, all of us, Ian included, and – and you’ll be hearing this a lot throughout the rest of the book – we just carried on.

Meanwhile, far from slowing, the pace began to pick up.

Rob had jacked in his job at Eagle Star Insurance on Princess Street. His base was his attic flat in Chorlton and with plenty of time to devote to management work he’d come to us with gig offers all the time. We never said no. Wherever it was, whatever it was, we’d agree.

Christ, it must have been exhausting for Ian. (After we found out I eased off getting on at him about not moving his amp, so at least that was one advantage of being epileptic – every cloud and all that.)

But seriously. I mean: if I was that knackered I was nodding off at the pelican and sliding off my chair at work, how did he feel? But, because Ian was Ian, and didn’t want to let us down, he allowed us to keep on going like nothing had happened, and nobody – not us, Tony, Rob, Debbie, his parents, doctors or specialists – stepped in to say he should do anything different. All of which suited us fine, I hate to admit, because the discovery of Ian’s epilepsy coincided with a period when the band was really beginning to take off.

Having the
An Ideal for Living
EP out as twelve-inch had made promotion so much easier. We didn’t have to apologize for it the way we’d had to with the seven-inch. With the twelve-inch out, both Rob and the band had something great to work with – something that represented us really well.

God knows how much time Rob spent in phone boxes. He must have used them like an office, phoning round for gigs and reactions on the records then phoning us. We were easily reachable, so Rob would just grab a load of coins, go to the phone box and ring us up. I’d pick up the phone at work, probably exhausted from a gig the night before.

‘All right, Hooky. It’s Rob.’

‘All right, Rob.’

‘John Peel likes the record. He wants us in for a session.’

I’d put down the phone and I wouldn’t think,
Aw, that’s going to be stressful for poor old Ian
; I’d think,
Fucking hell, we’re going to do a session for John Peel!
and go for a run.

We were totally in awe of John Peel and his programme, and he’d already played tracks off the EP. Somewhere I’ve still got the tape with the places marked in biro where John introduces our tracks, can still remember listening to it in the car, freezing, taping off the car radio on one of those portable cassette players. Doing the session was mind-blowing. For a start, when you work for the BBC you get paid personally: the money comes to you, not to the group. (Later, in New Order, I used to love doing
Top of the Pops
because I got a cheque for £280 when I was getting nothing off the group.) But it was also mind-blowing because John Peel was a hero, a true musical hero. His was the only show on radio for people like us to listen to, so to be offered a session, well, that was like getting a chart placing back then, only better. We didn’t give a shit about chart placings. Right then success for us was about playing the music we wanted to play: that was that. For us, in Joy Division and New Order, it was always about playing without compromising your music. Doing that was the only success.

When you did a Peel session there was no messing about. It started at two, finished at four and there was no overrun. Hours overdubbing? Forget it. ‘Hey, why don’t we try some synth here?’ None of that. You were in and out.

Which suited me down to the ground. A great way to do things, if you ask me. Nowadays you’re so spoilt by technology you can spend hours and days and months on the computer perfecting every tiny detail. Of course there’s some great music being made that way. But is it greater than the music being made back then? No.

We were still at T. J. Davidson’s, where we were being very productive. From two rehearsals – one on a weeknight, for an hour or an hour-and-a-half, cost us £1.50, then three hours on Sundays, which was £3 – we’d get an idea a week and write two to three songs a month; and I’d say that from the time we wrote ‘Transmission’ onwards they just flowed like rain. I mean, writing songs is easy when you’re just starting out. It gets a lot harder and takes longer when you’ve written two or three hundred. You get overdrawn at the riff bank. But back then we couldn’t stop writing them.

All four of us had ideas. One of us would have been listening to Kraftwerk and suggest using that sound as the basis for a song. We’d all chip in and by the time the song was finished, even though the seed of the song had been Kraftwerk, it wouldn’t sound like Kraftwerk at all. That was the art. It sounded like Joy Division. In this particular case it sounded like ‘Digital’, in fact.

‘Shadowplay’ happened in a similar way: Bernard had been listening to ‘Ocean’ by Velvet Underground and wanted to write a track like that, with the surf sound, a rolling feeling in it. So we started jamming and that’s how we came up with ‘Shadowplay’. You wouldn’t say it sounded anything like Velvet Underground, but once you know you can hear the root.

That was the thing about Joy Division: writing the songs was dead easy because the group was really balanced; we had a great guitarist, a great drummer, a great bass player, a great singer. As soon as Ian died it became difficult. He had an ear for us, a great ear, and all bands need one of those. You could tell he would have been a great guitar player too. His guitars of choice were the Vox Peardrop and the Vox Teardrop, very idiosyncratic; the Teardrop had some wild built-in effects that he loved. He’d picked the guitar up late, starting around the time we were writing the songs that would become
Closer
. Maybe Barney’s playing was still bugging him, but a more likely explanation was that we were featuring more keyboards and Barney was switching between the
two. Maybe Ian thought he’d fill in. He played on the video for ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and was obviously quite a rudimentary player, but you could tell he would have got so much better because he had that ear – he thought like a musician. The way it worked was that he’d listen to us jamming, and then direct the song until it was . . . a song. He stood there like a conductor and picked out the best bits.

Which was why, when we lost him, it made everything so difficult. It was like driving a great car that had only three wheels. The loss of Ian had opened up a hole in us and we had to learn to write in a different way. It was hard, that period, just starting New Order, and we suddenly found it very difficult to adjust. We felt like we’d been cheated. It had been so easy, so good when it was the four of us. We were so tight, as a group, we didn’t even use a tape recorder half the time. Didn’t need one. We had the odd one, of course, but they never lasted or the quality was so poor as to make them virtually useless. But it didn’t matter because we could do most things from memory. Everything up to and including
Unknown Pleasures
really existed only when the four of us were in a room together playing it. Not written down, not recorded, just from memory.

Peter Saville has a wonderful theory that musicians stop writing great music when they learn about the formal process of making music. Why? Because then they won’t take any chances. When you’re young, you go, ‘G, B. Oh yeah, man, that fucking takes your head off that! Weird but sounds great!’

Then, when you get older and you know a lot more about how music is
supposed
to sound, you go, ‘Oh, that G, B, that jars a little doesn’t it? Oh no, try E flat. That’s better,’ and the edge is gone. I agree with him. The more proficient you become at writing music the less chances you take because you become aware of all the rules and theories that may well be the proper way to do things but end up constricting you, throttling all the creativity out of what you’ve got. No more risk-taking. Back then we didn’t know rules or theory. We had our ear, Ian, who listened and picked out the melodies. Then at some point his lyrics would appear. He always had his scraps of paper that he’d written things down on and he’d go through his plastic bag. ‘Oh, I’ve got something that might suit that.’ And the next thing you knew he’d be standing there with a piece of paper in one hand, wrapped around the microphone stand, with his head down, making the melodies work.
We’d never hear what he was singing about in rehearsal because the equipment was so shit. In his case it didn’t matter because as he delivered the vocal with such a huge amount of passion and aggression, like he really fucking meant it. It was great. Who cared what he was saying as long as he said it like that. When we were mixing Rob Gretton always use to say, ‘Make it go WOOOMPH!’ and Ian always did.